When we were filming Yentl, Barbra Streisand arranged a coach trip to Theresienstadt. It was the most sobering and overwhelming experience. Theresienstadt had been a concentration camp, not an extermination camp. It looked like an out-of-season caravan park: a memorial to the banality of evil. There was nothing there that could alarm you or make you realise how people suffered there. In fact, I later found out that some of my relatives had died there.
Much, much later on, about five years ago, I went to Auschwitz. It made me extremely angry and feel helpless at the same time. Of course, like Theresienstadt, the long barracks, where people were so cruelly housed, were all cleaned, but the manifold tragedies that had occurred there weigh on you. It was a hateful place. It left me feeling as if I didn’t want to laugh ever again. There are collections of hundreds of thousands of suitcases and umbrellas, and shoes — millions of pairs of shoes — behind windows, and you realise that each is a skeleton of a person: a human being wore those shoes and carried that case and that umbrella, and within hours of arriving at Auschwitz, they were just ashes. It was an efficient death factory.
It had also been made into a tourist destination. People were eating ice creams and looking at the death chambers, walking around taking snapshots of each other. ‘There’s no business like Shoah-business,’ as they say. I wanted to scream at them, ‘My cousins died here. How would you like that?’ It is as if the horror of what happened doesn’t sink into people, they try not to see it, but they must: that’s why it’s there — for us to be aware, and not let it happen again. This is what can result when some people become ‘less important’, when it’s frighteningly easy to take life away.
Neither Hitler, nor the many previous centuries of pogroms, succeeded in our eradication, however, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m so outspoken. I push being Jewish down people’s throats; it’s my way of saying: ‘Hitler didn’t win, I’m still here and I’m still saying I’m a Jew, so you can’t ignore me. I’m here.’ I can’t let it be. Why should I let it be when, in my lifetime, six million people were murdered, because of it? How can I hide my head and duck down behind the parapet?
So much energy has been focused on the concept of Israel, the return to Zion, the ‘Homeland’; and when people are trying to destroy you — and not just trying but succeeding in destroying you — you cling on to the chance of life and hope, and a continuation of the family and the people and the nation. But when the Zionists reclaimed Israel, they didn’t take into account the Palestinians who were already living there. What were they supposed to do? Were they supposed to disappear? That’s where, as a people, we Jews fell down, and where Hitler won. He changed us from being a compassionate nation into a destructive, uncaring and inhumane one. The tragedy of the Palestinians is just as much the tragedy of the Jews.
Choosing My Side
Since I met the Hodgkin family, I’ve always been political — now more than ever. I thought I was a middle-of-the-roader, but I veer towards the left. Since Brexit, politics consume me; I never thought that I would feel so alienated from my own people, from my country.
We have now in power a government, chosen by a relatively small number of people, of almost unparalleled incompetence, whose probity is in doubt, whose lack of diligence has killed thousands of people, and whose majority in Parliament prevents their being held to account.
Like Alastair Campbell, in his recent article in the New European, I am puzzled by the lack of rage in the country. Racial prejudice fuelled the Brexit blindness. And my heart bleeds for Britain, particularly for the young. We are part of Europe; the knaves who bamboozled the nation into thinking otherwise will deserve the damning verdict of history, but I won’t be there to see it. This is truly Scoundrel Time.
I don’t look back on the British Empire with any sense of pride. We were taught at school that the Empire was marvellous, giving India trains and cricket and saving the savage Africans from the eternal fires of damnation and all that — and that was simply wrong. Some British people don’t like facing the truth of our colonial past and that’s part of the problem; they don’t want to be re-educated about our long history of exploitation and cruelty. Those people have always thought of England as the best country in the world. Well, it isn’t. It was cruel and greedy and unjust, much like the rest of the world, and the aftermath of Empire has given rise to a hateful legacy of racism.
The English are not open to the outside, or to outsiders.
My parents were good people, but they were conservatives. They believed in Winston Churchill and thought Ernest Bevin was a terrible man — they thought he was an antisemite, and that may have been true. They weren’t extreme right-wingers but always voted Tory. They brought me up to be a good Tory too.
After spending so much time in the company of Liz Hodgkin’s large, vociferous and opinionated household, I challenged my parents — although I knew they wouldn’t change. As soon as I could vote, I voted Labour and with only one exception, on which more later, I’ve been a Labour voter all my life.
I engaged in politics when I was at Cambridge. I was active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, even more so than in nuclear disarmament, which was the major ‘cause’ of my generation. The appalling injustices and deliberate cruelty white South Africans imposed on their black countrymen was what first ignited my activism. Even my parents agreed with me about that. Our cousins from South Africa had stayed with my grandparents before Mummy got married. She remembered the way they threw their clothes on the floor, expecting a servant to pick them up.
I have always felt an outsider — as did my parents, and they passed it on to me; it’s one of my most powerful emotions growing up. I felt I knew well what it would be like to be black and to be shut out from the world that everybody else was enjoying. The unfairness of the apartheid regime enraged me and that’s why I volunteered to work in the campaign office in London and went to demonstrate outside South Africa House, something I did many times. Many years later, after Mandela had been released, Antony Sher and I were invited to a function at South Africa House; it was strange to be walking as a guest into the place that had become a symbol of everything I hated.
After Cambridge, as soon as I got my first professional acting jobs in theatre, I became a member of the actors’ union Equity. When I first joined the BBC Radio Drama Repertory Company, I was elected to the audio committee and served on it for over thirty years. Eventually, I was elected to the Council. Since then, I have always been an active and vocal participant in my trade union.
At that time, in the late sixties and throughout the seventies, Equity was sharply divided on how best to fight apartheid. A growing list of international playwrights, including Daphne du Maurier, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Muriel Spark and Arthur Miller signed a declaration through the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London, refusing performing rights for their plays to all theatres in South Africa where discrimination was practised on grounds of colour.